1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to computer related and/or assisted systems, methods, and computer program devices for supporting the interactive analysis and/or management of intellectual property documents by legal and technical personnel. More particularly, it relates to methods and systems for providing for annotating an intellectual property document; and/or relating, traversing, reporting, and/or viewing linked documents, document elements, digital data and/or individual elements therein. Annotations may contain, e.g., informative text, user defined categories and attributes, and/or analyses of conformance with or violation of related intellectual property rights owned or licensed by a company or its competitors, etc., thereby enriching the functionality and knowledge base of an intellectual property owner concerning the intellectual property owned by it and/or another.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many corporations are focusing on their intellectual property assets as being quite valuable. Hence these companies strive to develop large intellectual property portfolios, and indeed spend time and money on these assets. There is a concomitant pressure to leverage and/or better manage these portfolios of intellectual property assets. As a result, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on better ways to analyze the value of a portfolio, better processes for managing the portfolio and better strategies for creating opportunities to extract value from the portfolio.
While these management techniques have resulted in more efficient use of attorney resources, and more targeted intellectual property filings and funding, relatively little has been done to take advantage of current computational technologies, the integration of data resources (largely through the Internet), and better knowledge-based software systems to handle aspects of intellectual property. As a result, no process or product exists for handling the full range of intellectual property functions in an automated manner.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the market for a comprehensive system that incorporates tools that will give the intellectual property professional the ability to work in all aspects of their practice area using automated, analysis tools to prepare them in their practice.
Moreover, many corporations have a wide range of intellectual property assets, but no technique to make associations between assets. For example, a particular license may implicate several patents. Conventional systems do not support the association of the intellectual property assets, and they certainly do not support a memorialized explanation of the association. Even if a user is able to determine a few related intellectual property assets, the problem of determining associated intellectual property assets grows geometrically more complex with the number of intellectual property assets.
Accordingly, we have determined that the complexities affecting the analysis, use, accessing, researching, presenting, etc., of intellectual property and related information make it extremely difficult for a customer to integrate information in various scenarios. We have determined that a customer might want to determine, e.g. which patents (or other intellectual property documents) are implicated by and/or related to, for example, a license for a particular product. We have further determined that a customer might want to ascertain the intellectual property documents that are related on multiple levels, optionally including details relating to the relationships. Further, a customer might desire to annotate one or more intellectual property documents. There exists a profound need for such a method and/or system.